viernes, 1 de diciembre de 2017

Since the semester is over, I thought I'd use this blog to post some ideas on how to discuss certain concepts in history class.

One of the most difficult ones to explain to my students has been social status and social class. I suspect the reason for this is that these concepts are both very present in their lives, but our society (Mexican middle class) also trains us to ignore them. Ask any Mexican high schooler (particularly in an urban setting) if they'd consider taking a job as a street cleaner, and they'd just KNOW it's a lower class job than being president. Nonetheless, if you point this out to them, it's still not a direct connection.

This also happens when I've tried to connect the concept of social class to the concept of rigid social structure. I ask my students if it's true that in Mexico anyone could be born poor and become President and they say yes. However, when I ask them if Mexico has specific social strata that have specific jobs, which means only certain high-status people are allowed to govern, they also say yes.

It's tricky, but those contradictions are not uncommon in today's societies. Nonetheless, I watch a lot of Youtube, and I got an idea.

Recently, I came across a Youtube channel called English Heritage, which focuses on making history videos about Great Britain. It has a specific series called The Victorian Way, where (among other things) they recreate recipes from the real-life recipe book of Mrs. Avis Crocombe, who was the cook at Audley End House, Essex, around the end of the 19th century.

The videos are short and fun, as well as superbly produced, probably to promote the Mrs. Crocombe tour at Audley End House. While watching them, I noticed Mrs. Crocombe tends to emphasize the social class of her recipes. It sounds odd, but see if you also notice it:

1. Mince Pies. When making mince pies, which are a traditional, high-class meal for the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Crocombe points out that her pies are small because Lord and Lady Braybrook must eat delicately. She also specifies that it's hunting season, so Audley End House will be receiving a lot of visits, presumably from other high-class individuals who also eat delicately. In describing the ingredients, she points out that there are modern variations to this recipe (particularly not adding meat and using puff pastry instead of shortcrust pastry), but that Lord and Lady Braybrook are "very traditional", which is why she ignores these variations and uses traditional ingredients (like ox tongue). Other ingredient, like sherry, spices, and caster sugar, were traditional and also too expensive for most people in 19th century Britain, because they required long manufacturing processes and were probably imported from British colonies like India.

2. Curry. Without much introduction, Mrs. Crocombe points out in the first few seconds of the video that curry is a middle-class meal, but that she "occasionally" also makes it for Lord and Lady Braybrook, if only because Queen Victoria herself (now also Empress of India) apparently approves of it. In order to understand this reasoning, it's important to point out that middle classes in the 19th century were just as rich, if not richer than higher classes. The difference was middle classes only obtained their status by having money, usually by being industrial capitalists, and spending it on cooks and expensive, spicy meals. On the other hand, high classes got their status from being traditional nobles, but not necessarily being rich. At the time, it was an uncomfortable position for higher classes to have to adapt to the practices of middle classes, like eating impractical meals from across the globe, just to maintain their status.

3. Chocolate Pudding. Again, in the first line of the video, Mrs. Crocombe points out that this pudding is nothing but "a treat for the servants," which makes it a lower class meal. This can be noticed, not necessarily in the entire recipe being cheap (she says it's a treat and specifically suggests buying "the best chocolate you can afford"), but in how it makes use of bread crumbs (which are made from stale bread) instead of fresh flour, as well as how it involves a very short preparation process (literally just mix all the ingredients together) and may be left unattended while it steams. The recipe is clearly designed to make use of leftover ingredients while not distracting servants from their main jobs, which were to take care of Audley End House. Notice how it doesn't include any type of pastry, meringue, or spice, all of which require more labor and money.

Another interesting point is that while each meal has a clear social status, Mrs. Crocombe specifies certain crossovers. Lord and Lady Braybrook may be nobles, but they sometimes enjoy curry, and Lord Braybrook eats a more delicate version of the chocolate pudding she makes for the servants. Similarly, her curry recipe includes a lot of vegetables, probably to make it cheaper, and the servants are said to be able to afford expensive chocolate sometimes. The 19th century was a time where social status was still important, but the lines were becoming blurred, and this made people crazy. I explain this a little in my video about the concepts of nationalism and fatherland:

I hope you learned something. Comment below if you think I should make a cooking video explaining this.

"All those people in China who sell opium or smoke opium should receive the death penalty. We trace the crime of those barbarians who through the years have been selling opium, then the deep harm they have wrought and the great profit they have usurped should fundamentally justify their execution according to law. We take into to consideration, however, the fact that the various barbarians have still known how to repent their crimes and return to their allegiance to us by taking the 20,183 chests of opium from their storeships and petitioning us, through their consular officer [superintendent of trade], Elliot, to receive it. It has been entirely destroyed and this has been faithfully reported to the Throne in several memorials by this commissioner and his colleagues.

Fortunately we have received a specially extended favor Born His Majesty the Emperor, who considers that for those who voluntarily surrender there are still some circumstances to palliate their crime, and so for the time being he has magnanimously excused them from punishment. But as for those who again violate the opium prohibition, it is difficult for the law to pardon them repeatedly. Having established new regulations, we presume that the ruler of your honorable country, who takes delight in our culture and whose disposition is inclined towards us, must be able to instruct the various barbarians to observe the law with care. It is only necessary to explain to them the advantages and advantages and then they will know that the legal code of the Celestial Court must be absolutely obeyed with awe.

We find your country is sixty or seventy thousand li [three li make one mile, ordinarily] from China Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? "3. "The Travels of Lao Ts'an: An Exploration of its Art and Meaning" by C. T. Hsia

2. "A Country Doctor's Notebook" by Chris BirdIn 1916 Mikhail Bulgakov, 24 years old and fresh from medical school in Kiev, was posted to a snowbound rural clinic in northwestern Russia, “thirty-two miles from the nearest electric light,” to fill a gap left by doctors serving on the eastern front. In his semi-fictionalised account, A Country Doctor's Notebook, the young medic spends the journey to the remote hospital on rutted tracks, worrying about how he will cope with tracheotomies and obstructed labour (he has seen only two normal deliveries at medical school), fretting over his youthful appearance, and urging himself to walk, not run.

He doesn't have to wait long before a cart rumbles into the hospital yard carrying a young woman with a leg smashed in a flax brake, her pulse barely palpable. “‘Die. Die quickly,' I said to myself. ‘Die. Otherwise what am I to do with you?'” However, he horrifies himself by ordering the “feldsher,” the Russian equivalent of a physician's assistant, to prepare the theatre for an amputation. His own adrenaline as potent as the camphor injections given to revive the patient, he saves her by removing the leg.

Later he is presented with a fetus with a transverse lie and has to examine the woman in front of the hospital's veteran midwife: “The fact was that once the experienced Anna Nikolaevna had told me what was wrong, this examination was quite pointless.” The midwife breaks protocol, advising a “podalic version.” The doctor gravely concurs, announces that he's off for a cigarette, and runs to look up “podalic version” in his textbook of operative obstetrics. As they scrub in, Anna Nikolaevna recounts how his predecessor performed the procedure. “I listened avidly to her, trying not to miss a single word. Those ten minutes told me more than everything I had read on obstetrics for my qualifying exams, in which I had actually passed the obstetrics paper ‘with distinction.'”

Such an internship, including an attack by wolves while on his way to a home visit in the middle of a blizzard, is no longer the norm for house officers (although it remains so for many doctors in the developing world). But Bulgakov's struggle with the dark Russian winter swirling outside his window symbolises the lack of experience, loneliness, and the worry of breaking the Hippocratic oath that gnaws at the sleep of junior doctors everywhere.

Shattered by morphine addiction, typhus, and his forced conscription during the brutal Russian civil war, Bulgakov abandoned medicine to write, including the novel The Master and Margarita. The attentions of the Soviet censors, Stalin's secret police, and renal disease pushed Bulgakov into an early grave (his brother Nikolai escaped Russia to become a respected cardiologist in Paris). He had his doubts about the medical profession—“I won't call doctors murderers, that would be too harsh, but I will call them casual untalented hacks”—but medicine was for him a light in the dark days of Soviet repression. “Each person ought to be a doctor,” Bulgakov wrote, “in the sense of disarming all the invisible enemies threatening life.”

The themes from A Country Doctors Notebook continue to resonate with residents today. They include fear of responsibility for others’ health and well-being, lack of confidence due to inexperience, and loneliness and boredom in regard to routine and mundane tasks. Bulgakov establishes the status and superior authority of the physician in his text by contrasting the ‘electric lights’ of the city which he associates with intellectual pursuits, with the darkness of the rural area in which he is based and practising as a resident. This lends emphasis to the elite position of the physician. Hospitals and health care environments remain hierarchical environments with physicians typically assuming leadership roles and residents reluctant to challenge authority (Lerner 2007).

Bulgakov became addicted to morphine after he began to treat himself for chronic abdominal pain, apparently following his wounding during active service. Other reports indicate that Bulgakov contracted diphtheria from a child patient during a tracheotomy. This operation is described in the story of The steel windpipe, also from A Country Doctors Notebook.

The story Morphine is about Sergei Polyakov, a resident who becomes addicted to morphine whilst working in a remote rural hospital. The narrative unfolds through Polyakov’s diary entries. He begins using morphine to treat physical pain, the first dose being administered by Anna Kirillovna, a married nurse with whom he begins a doomed affair. As his use of morphine increases, he notes its efficacy, not just for analgesia but also in dulling the emotional distress he experiences after his lover, an opera singer leaves him. As his addiction deepens, the tale reveals various justifications and rationalisations for his continued usage. His account echoes the sentiments of the ‘self-experimenters’ as he suggests that he is testing morphine to appreciate its therapeutic value, ‘I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped 7 min after the injection’ (p. 125) and, in justifying his usage, ‘It would be a good thing if a doctor were able to test many drugs on himself. He would then have a completely different understanding of their effect’ (p. 125)

The propensity for physicians to self-medicate is noted as Polyakov attempts to manage his symptoms using detached and scientific language, ‘The pain came again…fearing a recurrence of yesterday’s attack, I injected myself in the thigh with one centigramme [of morphine]. The pain ceased almost instantaneously’(pp 125–126).

As Polyakov’s addiction takes hold he begins to manipulate others, in particular Anna, and abuses his professional position, in order to maintain his drug supply, ‘Kindly give me the keys to the dispensary, I’m speaking as a doctor’ (p. 129) and ‘Are you going to do it [make up morphine solution]?’ She…answered quietly ‘Alright, I’ll do it’ (p. 129).

martes, 7 de noviembre de 2017

Colonialism/Imperialism: The simple way to distinguish these two is to think of colonialism as practice and imperialism as the idea driving the practice. Colonialism is the implanting of settlements on a distant territory.

Colonialism in its modern form first began to take shape about 400 years ago, and it changed the economic landscape of the world forever. For one thing, it enabled Europe to get fabulously rich on the trade it produced. The foundations of what we now think of as free-market capitalism were invented during the colonial era, partly to handle trade.

It’s an undecided question in academic circles (amongst historians for instance) as to whether colonialism is important purely for its economic consequences, or whether cultural factors (such as missionary Christianity or a sense of racial superiority) also plays a part.

Imperialism is a word with a long history. It was first associated with ancient Rome (a fact that is borne out quite emphatically in the first pages of Heart of Darkness, where the presence of the Romans gives a sense of history). It didn’t begin to be used much in the English-speaking world until the late 1800s. Imperialism has a specifically expansionist connotation.

The industrial revolution caused extensive expansion policies of the European countries over the Asian and African continents to gain new territories for raw materialistic gains. The need for a constantly expanding market for products caused expansionism over the entire surface of the globe; thus, the means to gain economically can be termed as 'Capitalist Expansionism'. ◆An economic expansion is marked by increased production with labor gains and exploitation of resources from the weaker nations. The associations between mercantile capital, empire building, and colonial ventures had already been secured by the late eighteenth century. Capital inducted in the triangular trade between England, Africa, and the Caribbean region had a heavy impact on New World Iberian colonies. The African slave trade, for example, provided labor force for Brazilian and Caribbean sugar plantations that produced sugar for the western Europe and North America markets. Colonial capitalism was indeed a sign of global finance capitalism.

lunes, 6 de noviembre de 2017

People in Africa were burdened by colonial perceptions of who they were. The British believed Africans were essentially different from Europeans and would stay that way. This point of view invited racism, implying that Africans were not just different but also inferior.

The French, by comparison, were prepared to treat Africans as equals, but only if they learnt to speak French properly and adopted the values of French culture. If they reached a sufficient level of education Africans might be accepted as French citizens. To fall below the required level was to invite charges of racial inferiority.

France encouraged an increasing closeness with her colonies on the eve of independence and thereafter. Britain took the view that it would give limited support to its colonies as they moved into independence; for the British independence meant being independent of Britain.

Back in 1914 there was already an African politician in the French National Assembly (the equivalent of the British House of Commons). This was Blaise Diagne, representing Senegal. Another leading figure was Leopold Senghor. Before he became a politician, he was a teacher. In the 1930's he took the post of senior classics teacher at the Lycee in Tours, France. No British public school or grammar school at that time would have accepted an African as a teacher no matter how brilliant.

At a military level, there was a continued reliance on African soldiers by the French. Senegalese soldiers continued to be in the French army after World War II. This stands in contrast with the British, who immediately demobbed African soldiers after the war.

Acquiring the values and language of the French brought opportunities and prospects for people in the French colonies. But these were not enough for the growing number of nationalists.

In the 1950's African delegates in the French National Assembly came together to form the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) under the leadership of Felix Houphouet-Boigny from the Cote D'Ivoire. Senghor broke with the RDA in 1948 and formed the Bloc Democratique Senegalais, or BDS. He was determined that Senegal should be the leading political force in the region."I would like to assure the whites of our unshakable will to win our independence and that it would be stupid as well as dangerous for them to wish to make the clock march backwards. We are ready, if necessary as a last resort, to conquer liberty by any means, even violent ones."Leopold Senghor talking in August 1946.

SOLDIER'S POINT OF VIEW

"I got into the French army during the colonial period...and first I was a private, then I became a sergeant in the army after four months....This was 26 July 1956. I really felt fine when I was in the French army...but unfortunately for me, after independence in my country, Senegal, our former Prime Minister, Mamadou Dia, asked us to leave the French army, but we didn't join our Senegalese army...instead I was sent to work in our ministry of finance.

I liked to be in the French army because it gave me more opportunities than the Senegalese army. With the French army, I could have easily become a captain, whereas with the Senegalese army that was not possible. This is why I really wanted to be a French citizen, because it gave me better prospects for my future.

I didn't become a French citizen because I was told at that time that if I became a French citizen I would no longer have the opportunity to see my family. This is the only reason why I decided not to become a French citizen and remain Senegalese." Isidore Mandiouban, retired Senegalese soldier.

In 1960 independence came to most of the French colonies. In the same year Nigeria, the Gambia, Cameroun and Somalia became independent of British rule. Nigeria, because of its size and strong regional power bases, opted for a federal structure at independence.

Sierra Leone was brought to independence under leadership of a Mende Prime Minister, Milton Margai, sending a message to the old Krio elite that their days were over.

Uganda's independence was affected by an uncomfortable alliance between the Kabaka (king) of Buganda and the Prime Minister, Milton Obote.

Under Nyerere and his party TANU (the Tanganyika African National Union) Tanganyika, (later Tanzania) swept to independence. Nyerere had the advantage of the Swahili language, which was an African lingua franca understood nationwide and beyond. This was a key element, along with his charismatic leadership, to the people of Tanganyika having a sense of national unity, despite the many ethnic groups in the country.

The neighbouring island of Zanzibar became independent of British rule, but remained under Arab domination until 1964.

martes, 31 de octubre de 2017

We will use this couple of classes for you to catch up with any activities you didn't do this month and/or make up for any previous mistakes by improving any activities that you feel you could improve.

Now, do not think we are doing this because you need it, or because we have to. All of you are doing well this partial, and there is no reason why you should do worse next partial. However, part of this new model's flexibility is that if you know you can do better, you should have the chance to show it.

Just so I don't lose my mind, we need to be organized about this. If you want to catch up or make up, you will have to upload one .docx Word file to Blackboard, before midnight on November 2. If you upload more than one document, I will only look at the first one that appears. If it is not a .docx document, I won't check it. Why? Because doing this is already extra work for me, and I don't think it's fair for you to make me go through the same old excuses ("no se subió", "no entendí", "no leí las instrucciones", "no sé mandar e-mails", "no sé escribir González", "no tengo Word", etc) the second time around. Be prepared. Make it work.
The file may have the following activities, specifically in this order:

You don't need to re-do all the activities, but the ones you do improve need to be in the above order, and each activity should have the title I gave it in this blog post. If I can't figure out which activity you remade or who is in your team, I won't check whatever you uploaded.

Anticipating some questions:

1. Will I be extremely demanding while grading your improved activities, expecting real improvement and not just the same old mistakes?

2. Do I recommend that you ask for help if you didn't understand how to do something the first time and never really took the time to do it?

Yes. Give yourself the opportunity to use this time to improve.

3. What happens if you're satisfied with your performance, or don't really feel like redoing anything?

That's up to you. If you don't have anything to do in class, we may talk about any topics you have an itch about, or you may work on other stuff while your classmates take advantage of this opportunity (and I take the time to help others or grade your activities). Either way, stay with us during the class hour, and please be patient. Patience, take each other by the hand.

4. Would I recommend doing this, or the extra points video?

Definitely this. None of you need extra points. Unless you know your video is gonna be REALLY GOOD, I suggest focusing on the things that aren't extra.